But he hadn’t anticipated that voice demanding Stormy. Stormy. He’d thought himself in love with her once. Maybe still.
In love with her, the vampire thought, hearing every whisper that passed through the young man’s mind. So that was the shape of things.
What is wrong with her? the vampire asked.
“I wish I knew,” Jason said. Then he glanced sideways at Max. “What’s wrong with her, I mean.”
Max nodded.
The vampire knew they were rapidly moving farther away than his power could reach. He could stop them, but there was no need. He’d seen inside Beck’s mind. He would come back. He would bring Tempest back, because he loved his sister above all else.
See her to the hospital, then. But she must not remain! I will have her returned to Endover before this night is out. Is that understood?
“Yeah,” he said. “I understand.” His head was clearing, he thought. He rolled down the window to breathe in the fresh air. He felt the rush of it rejuvenating him.
In the back of the Jeep, Stormy moaned.
By the time Lou pulled into the hospital parking lot and got out, Stormy was awake and arguing. He could tell by the way her mouth was moving and the angry expression on her face in the glow of his headlights, when Max and Jason tugged her out of the Jeep and herded her toward the entrance.
It didn’t look like much fun, but Lou opted to join the party, anyway. He walked up to them somewhere in between “Come on, Storm, it’s only common sense to get it checked out” and “If I have to see one more fucking doctor I’m going to need a shrink instead!”
He smiled in spite of himself as he joined them, and his mere presence earned him a scowl from Stormy that should have wilted him. “Hey, don’t look at me. I’m just along for the ride.”
“Oh, thanks, Lou,” Max snapped. “Don’t let him kid you, Stormy. He’s the one who talked me into this.”
“I’m fine.” She said it with her jaw clenched.
“You’re probably right,” Lou said. “Maybe there’s nothing wrong at all. Tell you what, you tell me what it was you said back there, and no one will make you see a doc tonight, okay, kid?”
Her brows rose, but then she smelled a rat and lowered them. “What do you mean, what I said back there?”
“Wait a second, I jotted it down on the way over.” He dug in his pockets, his face all innocence. Max was watching him, he noticed, curiosity in her eyes. Maybe a hint of awe at his tactics. Hell, he wasn’t that good. He was mighty relieved, though, at the way she’d snapped at Beck just before they’d all left the visitor center. Maybe she wasn’t as unequivocally trusting of her old friend as she’d been pretending to be. He finally found the slip of paper, the back of a gas receipt. “I wrote it phonetically, of course.” He cleared his throat. “New! Keen-ay sko-ah-tay sah-be-ah, de sah-be-ah va pi-ere-ay.” He glanced at Max. “That was it, wasn’t it?”
“More like, ‘keen-eh sko-uh-tay,’” she said. “Other than that, you nailed it. Well, you butchered it, but you got the gist.” Her eyes touched his, just briefly. Gratitude, a little humor, some of the affection he was used to seeing there.
He’d missed it during her recent snit. He didn’t know what the hell he would do if he screwed up his oddball friendship with Mad Maxie. He’d been afraid he’d damaged things beyond repair, but the look they’d exchanged just then gave him hope that maybe their friendship could still be saved.
Max turned her gaze to Stormy, who was looking from one of them to the other, suspicion oozing from her eyes.
Lou thought the four of them must look pretty conspicuous, standing huddled in a hospital parking lot, under the streetlights, talking gibberish to one another.
“What are you talking about?” Stormy demanded. “When did I say anything like that?”
“You said that and a lot more. But I was scribbling in the dark,” Lou told her. “I don’t think I even want to attempt to repeat the rest of it. It was when that wolf had you backed up against the tree in the woods back there.”
“Wolf? There was a wolf?”
“Actually, Lou, she didn’t say any of it, until you drew down on the wolf,” Max clarified. “I almost got the feeling she was protecting it, telling you not to shoot.”
“You guys are making this up.”
Max moved closer to her, her expression serious and concerned. “Look at your blouse, Stormy.”
Stormy looked down at the front of herself, seeing the slight tears in the fabric of her blouse and the distinct paw print atop one breast. Her brows drew together. Her lips trembled. “Oh, my God.”
“You…you reached out. You petted the wolf,” Max told her. “It was the damnedest thing I ever saw. You petted it, and it stopped growling. It dropped to the ground and ran away.”
Stormy’s eyes, wet now, met Maxie’s. “Why don’t I remember?”
“I don’t know, baby. I don’t know. That’s what we’re here to find out.” Max slid her arms around the other woman, held her for a second. “It’ll be okay, though. We’re here for you.”
Stormy straightened, but the defiance was long gone from her face and her stance. There was stark fear in her baby blues now. Fear and confusion.
“I wonder what language that was?” Max asked as they moved toward the emergency room entrance.
Lou shrugged. “I don’t think it was any language at all. Just gibberish. Does Storm even speak a foreign language?”
“Nope,” Max said.
“I do so,” Stormy said, a hint of weak humor in her tone. “I speak Spanish.” They all knew her grasp of Spanish was pitiful, at best.
“Was that Spanish, Storm?” Max asked.
Sighing, she lowered her head. “No. It’s nothing I ever heard before. And I don’t remember saying it, or anything about any wolf. Jesus, you’d think I would remember a wolf.”
Max nodded. “You passed out cold right after. Stayed out almost all the way here. That would account for being disoriented.”
“Just get checked out, huh, Storm?” Lou asked. “For our sakes, if not your own.”
“I agree with them,” Jason added. “It’s only logical to make sure you haven’t developed some side effect from the bullet or the coma. A blood clot or a hemorrhage or whatever.”
She closed her eyes, nodded once. “All right. We’re here, we might as well. I’ll get a quick X ray. Have them send the films back to my doc in White Plains, just in case. Okay? Will that get you all off my case?”
“It sure will,” Lou said. Then he moved past her and opened one of the double doors, held it wide as Stormy and Max walked inside, with Jason bringing up the rear.
The place wasn’t busy. Five minutes in the waiting area and Stormy was ushered into a treatment room, while Max continued filling out forms in the waiting area. She’d just finished with the forms when Jason appeared with three cups of hospital-stale coffee. He handed one to Lou, took another to Max.
Max accepted it and looked up at him. “I’m sorry I snapped at you back there, Jay. I was shaken up, that’s all.”
“I understand. I’ve been pretty shaken up myself the past couple of days. It’s forgotten, okay?”
She clutched his hand in one of hers, squeezed it. “Okay.”
Lou tried to pretend his grimace was due to the taste of the coffee, even though he had yet to take a sip.
Two hours and several cups of mud later, Stormy returned, with a forced-in-place smile and a clean bill of health. Max seemed relieved but not surprised. Lou couldn’t believe it.
As they all trooped out to the waiting vehicles, Max walked close to him, and, leaning up, she whispered, “I told you it wasn’t physical.”
“You can’t be a hundred-percent sure of that. Not until her head doctor in White Plains reviews the tests.”
Max shrugged. “That phrase she muttered back there. The one you jotted down. You still got that?”
He sent her a narrow-eyed glance. “Yeah. Why?”
“Can I have it?”
/>
He dug the scrap of paper from his pocket. She took it from his hand and jammed it into her own pocket with a quick glance at Jason and Stormy, who were walking a few feet ahead.
“What are you up to, Maxie?” Lou asked.
“Gonna try to get it translated.”
He shook his head. “It’s gibberish.”
“Maybe. But what if it’s not?”
“How could it be anything else? You said it yourself, Max. She doesn’t speak a foreign language. Even her high school Spanish is a running joke. There’s no way she could just start spouting sentences in a language she doesn’t know. It’s not possible.”
She looked up into his eyes and shook her head slowly. “Lou, haven’t you learned by now that anything is possible?”
10
Even as they reached the vehicles, Max’s cell phone bleated.
She frowned as she dug in her purse for it. “What do you know? It’s working again. I didn’t even realize it was still turned on.” She hit a button and brought it to her ear. “Maxine Stuart,” she said.
Brisk and businesslike—if the person on the other end had never met her, he would never realize he was talking to an impulsive hellion with a huge imagination, Lou thought.
Stormy and Jason stopped walking and turned around. “Guess we have reception again, huh?” Jason asked, while Max covered her free ear and hunched over the phone as if she were having trouble hearing.
“Maybe it’s only inside Endover the reception dies completely,” Stormy said, and the look she sent Lou told him she was starting to adopt Max’s penchant for conspiracy theories. Hell, it was bound to happen sooner or later.
“Do I need to come back there, Officer Gray?” Max was asking.
Lou looked at her sharply. “What’s going on, Max?”
She held up a hand. “All right. Thank you. Yes, I’ll check in as soon as possible.” She hit the cutoff and dropped the phone back into her purse, lifting her head to meet his eyes. “There was a break-in at the house.”
Lou swore softly. “Someone probably saw you moving out and wanted to look for any valuables you might have left behind,” he said.
“No, not that house. The house in Maine. The mansion. The alarm system Morgan had installed alerted the Easton PD, and an Officer Sandy Gray went out to investigate. The front door had been forced open—that gorgeous stained-glass oval broken all to hell and gone. The place was rifled. Computer’s missing. They’re not sure what else. They want me to come back and take inventory as soon as possible.”
Lou frowned, a million questions running through his mind. “Why would someone go after your computer, Max?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. To sell it, I guess.”
“Good thing I had the laptop with us,” Stormy said. “Don’t worry, Max, there’s nothing on your hard drive that we don’t have backed up.”
“Gimme the phone.” Lou held out a hand.
Max handed it over, and he hit the incoming calls log button to get the number, then pressed Send.
“Easton Police, Officer Gray speaking.”
Lou introduced himself as a fellow cop and a friend of Maxine’s, and proceeded to fire questions at the cop. By the time he hung up he had a better handle on things. “The televisions, VCRs and jewelry were undisturbed, as far as Gray can tell,” he said. “They left the computer monitor, the scanner, printer, all that. All they took was the tower. The break-in happened earlier today—they’ve been trying your cell every couple of hours since. Got the cell number off your business cards. The files were rifled. Not much else. Whoever did this was after something specific. Something they thought they would find in your files.”
Max frowned. “Well, it’s not like I have any top-secret information in there, aside from the…”
She stopped there, her eyes widening. “The DPI files,” she said. “The CD I stole five years ago from the burned-out ruins of that so-called research lab in White Plains. It had the case files of hundreds of vampires on it.”
“You never copied that onto your hard drive,” Stormy said.
“No, but there were copies packed in our stuff. I never took the time to put them in the safe. We…we barely unpacked. What if someone got it?”
“You think it was Frank Stiles, that bastard who shot me and tried to murder Dante?” Stormy asked.
Jason was staring from one of them to the next, his eyes wide. “Wait a minute, wait a minute. Vampire files? DPI? Who the hell is Frank Stiles?”
Max sighed, lowering her head. Lou could see the worry in her eyes, the regret. Hell, he didn’t blame her for it. If those details about the undead fell into the wrong hands, a lot of innocent vampires might die.
Innocent vampires. Hell, life since Max came into it was freaking surreal.
“Let’s get back to the motel,” Max said. “Lou, you drive Stormy. I’ll ride with Jay. He’s got a lot of catching up to do.”
Lou nodded. “Okay. Fine by me.” He reached for Max and snagged one arm around her waist, tugging her against him. It was the only way he could think of to get her close enough to warn her. Bending his head until his mouth was close to her ear, he whispered, “Be careful what you tell him, Max. I don’t trust him.”
“Damn,” she whispered back. “And here I thought you just wanted to hold me.” When she said it, her lips moved so close to his neck that they brushed his skin, her breath caressing, warm. It heated his blood. He felt a pulse in his throat beating harder. He did want to hold her, goddammit. What the hell was the matter with him?
“I don’t want to leave this case to go back there, Lou,” she whispered, successfully changing the subject.
He looked down into her face, her sincere, frustrated eyes, so wide and green. Her perfect, round cheekbones that always seemed to be begging to be touched. Traced. Kissed. He realized belatedly that his arm was still wrapped around her waist. He liked it there. She fit in the curve of his embrace.
With no small surge of regret, he let his arm fall to his side. “You don’t have to go back. Call Lydia. She’d be glad to drive up there and take care of this until we can get back. You tell her where you left the CDs, and she can check to see if they’re still there.”
She lowered her eyes. “Lydia. I don’t know, it seems like a huge favor to ask.”
He nodded. “Look, I know you haven’t known her that long. But she’s your birth mother, Max. She’s nuts about you. And she’s a good friend of mine, has been for years. Believe me, it wouldn’t be overstepping the bounds of your brand-new relationship with her. It really wouldn’t.” He shrugged. “I tend to think she’d move up there with you if you asked her.”
“Really?”
He nodded. “She loves you, Max.” And damn, he thought, what was not to love?
She nodded slowly. “Short of calling Morgan back from her honeymoon, I guess I don’t have anyone else I can ask.”
“I’ll call her on the way back, before we lose cell reception again.”
“Thanks, Lou. You always know what to do.” She slipped her arms around his neck, pulled his body close and brushed her lips over his jaw. Then she lowered herself and hurried over to Jason’s Jeep.
He watched her go, wondering why he was such a confused mess where she was concerned. At least she didn’t seem angry at him anymore. But just when he thought their friendship was safe, she went and pushed it a little further, leaving him turned on and ready to run, all at once.
He turned and started for the Bug. Stormy caught up before he reached it. “Looks like you’re finally falling for her, huh?”
“For who?”
“Max. That hug you gave her before she left—” She broke off, probably because he winced a little when she said it. He’d only hugged her so he could whisper his warning without Jason Beck overhearing it. He supposed that quick kiss she’d given him in return was her idea of payback.
“Don’t tell me,” she said. “It wasn’t a real hug.”
“It was real enough.” Even tho
ugh he hadn’t meant it to be, it had certainly felt real. A little too real, he thought.
“Don’t play with her, Lou. Not unless you mean it. She couldn’t take it.”
He frowned at Stormy, but she only turned and opened the passenger door to get into the car. What the hell was she talking about? Maxie was the toughest female he’d ever met. He couldn’t think of anything she couldn’t take. Besides, she’d given up on trying to seduce him despite that little display a moment ago. She was glad he was around. He understood that, because the feeling was mutual. No big deal.
A little voice inside reminded him that he’d been starting to doubt that was all there was to it. Ever since her passionate claim that she had never seen him as too old or worn-out to respond to her teasing, he’d been wondering, what if it wasn’t teasing at all? What if it was for real?
Hell, he couldn’t deal with that possibility, because he didn’t know how. Truth was, he was afraid of her. Imagine that. A veteran cop who’d seen just about everything there was to see, afraid of a pretty, spunky sprite like Maxie.
Well, stranger things had happened.
Max was still warm all over from Lou’s embrace—and still stinging with disappointment that it hadn’t meant a damn thing. Not that she’d thought for one instant that it had. Okay, maybe just for one brief instant—that moment when he pulled her hard against him, and her heart reared up on its hind legs and took off at a full gallop.
God, if she closed her eyes she could still feel him, holding her to him, hard and tight, as if—
“So the research lab in White Plains wasn’t really a research lab,” Jason said. “I got that much.”
His voice reined her ecstasy to a halt, and she forced herself to pay attention to him as he drove. “Actually, it was. Just not for cancer. It was the headquarters of a government organization called the Division of Paranormal Investigations.”
“DPI,” he said, nodding. “And they researched…vampires?”
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